Multi-Task Travel Route Planning With a Flexible Deep Learning Framework

Travel route planning aims to map out a feasible sightseeing itinerary for a traveler covering famous attractions and meeting the tourist's desire. It is very useful for tourists to plan their travel routes when they want to travel at unfamiliar scenic cities. Existing methods for travel route planning mainly concentrate on a single planning problem for a special task, but is not capable of being applied to other tasks. For example, previous must-visit planning methods cannot be applied to the next-point recommendation, despite these two tasks are closely related to each other in travel route planning. Besides, most of the existing work do not consider the important auxiliary information such as Point of Interests (POI) attributes, user preference, and historical route data in their approaches. In this paper, we propose a flexible Multi-task Deep Travel Route Planning framework named MDTRP to integrate rich auxiliary information for more effective planning. Specifically, we first construct a heterogeneous network through the relations between users and POIs and employ a heterogeneous network embedding method to learn the features of users and POIs. Then we present an attention-based deep model to integrate the auxiliary information and focus on important visited points for the prediction of next POIs. Finally, a beam search algorithm is introduced to flexibly generate multiple feasible route candidates for three types of planning tasks (next-point recommendation, general route planning, and must-visit planning). We introduce six public datasets to conduct extensive experiments, of which the results demonstrate the flexibility and superiority of the proposed approach in travel route planning.